DIY Sliding Barn Door

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I'm sooper excited to show you this sliding barn door project!  Check. It. Out.  That's it down there. 

Okay that's a bright picture, but it's all I gots!

So, our funky old house has so. many. doors.  Out of EIGHT rooms, only ONE has one door.  TWO rooms have TWO doors, and THREE rooms have........THREEEEEE doors!  Granted, it's a little bit of a different way to live always zig zagging through this maze, (but I am always comforted that should there be a fire, there's almost always three exits).  One of these days I may figure out why this old house was designed like this, but as for now...I dunno.

My point is - with all those doors moving in and out, one finds it hard to make the space for them to swing open and closed.  Most of the folks that own houses around here utilize the pocket door; I, however, fell in love with this sliding barn door I had come across photographs such as these below and knew it would be a great alternative to a pocket door:





  

















But upon looking into the price of sliding barn door hardware - I thought it would be wishful thinking swept under the rug.  I mean, that's not even a, "Well, maybe someday" investment.  That's more of like a, "Somebody put me out to pasture if I'm crazy enough to spend $300 on one door" investment.

And then, comes Country Living magazine to the rescue - they posted a lovely tutorial on how to DIY this here.

We already had a door lying around that we had taken from another area, so the whole project was done for around $40 using this hardware:

Okay, I goofed on the street elbows, and instead picked up  REGULAR 90° elbow pieces.  What you want is a 90° STREET elbow - and this means the threads will be on the outside of one side of the pipe, rather than the inside- to fit into those floor flanges you see there.

Once we got the hardware  home, it was just a bunch of measuring, drilling, screwing, and fitting the puzzle pieces together.

Can you look at it and see where everything went?  I will not post a detailed step-by-step tutorial, if you want that, got the link provided above.  I will; however, give these notes:

**It's a little bit tricky drilling into the side of a door - it's pretty thin - so take your time drilling and be careful not to split your wood.  Be mindful to go straight in, lest your drill angle out and make a hole through the front or back of your door!

**Make sure you measure the extra room for your eyelet hooks.  Your pipe will not be fitting directly above your door - I left about 1 1/2" extra for the pipe to go through the eyelets.

**When we first started moving the door around, it made an AWFUL squeaking noise.  I oiled mine up (with PAM. hehe), and it has worked just loverly ever since!

There we go!  That's the DIY sliding barn door for ya.

And, just FYI, this is what this area of the kitchen looked like shortly after we bought it.  This is NOT what it looked like WHEN we bought it.  Actually, I wish I had taken more pictures the day we stepped into this house...but just take it from me, there was a crazy black UFO lookin' fan/light in here, and the walls were dingy gray.

Pretty cool, huh?

And here's another photo, just for funsies: